Did I hear this right — Minnesota families are alarmed that their young men are recruited to travel overseas to commit acts of terrorism? Except reporters aren’t talking about shadowy military recruiters with unfettered access to US classrooms and kindergartens enticing American youth to join the global capitalist Jihad, the alarm is about Somali relatives enjoining their fellow refugees to return to their homeland to defend Somalia against Ethiopian invaders.
Trouble is, al-Shabaab, the organization leading the fight in Somalia is being declared a terrorist organization by the US Government. Strange really, because the only acts of terrorism in Somalia are being committed by the US military or their Ethiopian proxy. But terrorism has always been defined by authoritarian propagandists as only what the enemy does. Whether it is a state or an insurgency.
I should think this is problematic when the definition of terrorism is linked to a religious cause. Radical Islam, it would seem, becomes by definition a terrorist goal. Is there not something about the separation of church and state that should hinder the US from deciding that one religion can be outlawed?
Doesn’t this mark an escalation of US state oppression — for the state to decide on which side of foreign struggles its citizens are permitted to weigh? How are foreign populist movements to manage lobbyists in Washington to ensure their struggle isn’t blacklisted as “terrorist?”
It does open the door to American domestic counter-recruiting efforts. Declare the US military a terrorist organization, and we can halt its recruiters in their tracks. No more fresh recruit pipeline to the occupation zones, no more “underground railroad” to Fort Hood. Have the US Congress declare our military a perpetrator of terrorism. It’s not a difficult argument to make. Evidence goes back to before US independence, when “Americans” fought dirty against the continent’s aboriginal population. Now examples of US state sponsored terrorism are gratuitous. The young men we send on Jihad return with haunted consciences from the acts they inflict on innocent populations. What are the motives of indiscriminate bombing, apprehension and torture, but pure terrorism to buttress subjugation to US goals?